Every time Apple releases a new version of iOS or a new iPhone, it seems battery life becomes an issue. On the positive side, that also means we're getting really good at troubleshooting it and helping everyone get back to good battery life. If your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad on iOS 6 suddenly losing charge far too fast, or if your brand new iPhone 5 is draining before your eyes, here are some things you can try.

First: Are you using it more?

The first thing you need to do is make sure you simply aren't using your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad more than you used to. I know it sounds silly, but when you have new features like Flyover or turn-by-turn navigation to play with, or when you have a brand new iPhone you just can't put down, your battery might be draining because you're using it a lot more. With iOS 6 there are more notifications, location features, and other battery consuming features than ever before, and the iPhone 5 has a bigger screen and an LTE radio to really put the drain on.

Before you do anything drastic, put your device down for a minute make sure you're not the battery drain cause, because that's the easier thing to fix.

Second: Is there a problem with the OS or the device?

If, in general, your battery life is consistently short and you're basically just watching the indicator drain down before your eyes, here are some things to try, in order of how easy they are to do.

Restart/reset your device. If you haven't rebooted in a while, give it a try. There could be a rogue process or something else doing what it shouldn't be doing, and a restart can often fix that. (Here's how to reboot](http://www.imore.com/2010/12/17/beginner-tip-power-reset-ios-device-hit-problem/))

Power cycle. About once a month, and certainly if you're having problems, you should completely drain your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad's battery -- drain it until it shuts down on its own -- and then charge it back up to full.

Restore your device as new. The single biggest cause of battery life problems with iOS devices occurs when they are restored from backup and not set up as new devices. Whether it's cruft or corruption, a clean install as a new device -- incredible pain in the butt though it may be -- is usually the best fix for any battery life issues. This is the nuclear option. You will have to set up absolutely everything again, and you will lose all your saved data like game levels, but in most cases your battery life will be better than ever. (Here's how]

Check your cell signal. If you're in an area of weak signal, or at the edge of LTE or 3G support, your iPhone's radio could be screaming away on full power just trying to stay on the network, or switching between connection types, and wasting a lot of power. If you have bad reception, consider a micro-cell at home or at work. If you're at the edge of LTE, turn it off in Settings and stick with 3G until you get to a place with better coverage.

Go to the Apple Store. Sometimes you do get a lemon, or your iPhone or iPad develops a real problem that only Apple can solve by either swapping it for another device or otherwise figuring out a fix.

Third: Are you plugging it in?

Like our friend Phil Nickinson from Android Central always says, don't be ashamed to plug in your device! If you're using your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad a lot, plug it in to recharge whenever you can. At home, at work, in the car, there are plenty of opportunities to top up your battery.

Sure, it's a bit trickier with the iPhone 5, since it uses the new Lightning connector and that means you need new cables, and/or you old cables need pricy new adapters, but if you work on the road or in an office, the price is easily worth it.

Fourth: Have you turned off what you aren't using?

Anything running on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad uses up the battery. So if you've tried everything else and it turns out you're just using your device more than the battery will allow for the length of time you need to use it, you'll need to make some hard choices. You'll need to stop using some of the features you don't really need in order to keep using the ones you do. The more you turn off, the longer your batter will last -- but of course the less you'll be able to do. It's a balancing act but one that can help you squeeze out a little extra juice when you really need it.

Turn off Siri's Raise to Speak. Go to Settings, General, Siri. Readers keep telling us this has helped them with battery life due to accelerometer issues.

Turn off Location Services. Go to Settings, Privacy, Location Services, and turn off any app you really don't need tracking or using your location.

Turn off Push Notifications. Likewise, go to Settings, Notifications, and turn off any app you don't care to be alerted about.

Turn of Notification Center widgets. Stocks, and particularly weather in Notification Center seem to be causing our readers some battery grief. Since weather can be location-based now, the potential is there for more battery abuse.

Kill power hungry apps. Double-click the Home Button to activate the multitasking dock, hold your finger on an app to enter "jiggly" mode, and kill any apps that might be running in the background, especially VoIP (like Skype), streaming audio (like Pandora), or navigation (like TomTom). (Here's how)

Here are some old standbys as well:

Set Auto-Lock to 1 minute

Turn off any extra sounds, like keyboard clicks

Turn off the iPod EQ

Use headphones instead of the speaker if you have to listen to audio or music

Turn down the screen brightness

Turn off Bluetooth when not using it

Turn off Wi-Fi when not using it

Turn off LTE when not using it

Turn off cellular app and media downloads.

Set all email, calendar, and contacts accounts to "Fetch" (turn off Push)

Bonus tip: If you're really desperate, put your iPhone or iPad in Airplane Mode and save the radios for when you need them. If you're really desperate, you can also turn your device completely off until you need it (it will still use a tiny amount of power but far, far less than anything else).

How to get more help with your iOS 6 or iPhone 5 battery life

Be sure to let us know how what you're seeing with your iPhone 5 and iOS 6 battery life, and if any of these tips, or any other tips, help you improve it, make sure to tell us!

Senior Editor at iMore and a practicing therapist specializing in stress and anxiety. She speaks everywhere from conferences to corporations, co-host of Vector, Review, and Isometric podcasts, and should be followed on Twitter @Georgia_Dow.

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Reader comments

How to fix battery life issues with iOS 6 or iPhone 5

Georgia:
There is a little app for your IOS device (also works for Androids) from AMP Labs at UC Berkeley... it's called CARAT... It gathers info on your device, the processes it runs over a few days, diagnoses "Hogs" of power and "Bugs" it recommends that you looks at for possible power monsters. It gives you a 'score' for your device based on it's usage comparison of 'like' and 'un-like' devices it has in it's database and comes out pretty good over the course of about a month... So, if you have the time and really find out what your IOS device is doing, this is a great tool.. AND, it's free !!!!

Omg, the purpose of having Iphone 5 is to enjoy the features and functionality. Now you are told to turn off the notifications, turn off GPS, turn off Siri, turn off LTE, do not frequently use your phone, use it only when needed and... Etc. Such phone should be given higher batt capacity. Tim Cook really think batt 1440mAh can do wonders. He under estimate people use their phone only for calls. He forgetten consumer use it for their work, play and entertainment.

I can totally agree with you if I have to do all that to for a iphone then they can keep it... I do not see why so many people rave about this phone all the time having to turn off features power cycle the phone etc... My wife has a 1gen windows phone and to this day has never had to power cycle the phone and easy gets a full day of usage never turning off any features or anything.. seems this iphone is becoming more of a conversation piece than something you will actually use IMO..

The purpose of that section was indicated in the heading: "Have you turned off what you aren't using?"

Georgia isn't recommending everyone to turn off all their features. She's recommending that people turn off features they don't use. For example, I never use Siri Raise to Speak, so it's off. I also never use bluetooth, so that's off too.

well the whole article is on how to fix battery life issues with the iphone on ios 6 the fact that you have to result to these measure to obtain what most would consider normal battery life is crazy and not an excuse.. we are only pointing out a fact weather you need it or not the fact is other phones and os's can have these things turned on and still manage to get full day usage out of their phones...

Plenty of people have said it and I will say it again. This phone is not for tech people. I constantly use my iPhone all the time and while the battery may get pretty low sometimes, it rarely if ever dies. Even if I had to charge it twice a day I would still prefer an iPhone over a droid any day because it still offers a much better experience for *me*. Just like almost everyone else that has an iPhone, they choose to use it because it is the best for what they need. That is why Apple does so well with a closed phone, because they make devices for the majority. If you use your phone enough to where the battery drains too much, then you are not in the majority. Get a battery case, get chargers for wherever you are, if you don't like that then get a droid or windows phone and stop reading iPhone sites.

The advice in this article can just as easily be valid for android, windows phones. Even laptops I suppose. ie if you don't use bluetooth, turn it off. I have an android and iphone as I have 2 sims/numbers and turn off all power sapping apps/connections etc I don't require. Emphasis on "I don't require'. Turning airplane mode on or turning your phone off to save battery life is just nonsense IMO. Why have a phone if it doesn't function as one???

Been weary of apple releases for a good number of years making every generation OHH 20% thinner and AHH twice as fast... and ohh same battery life as before! Why not just leave it the same size and use the extra space to put a battery with twice the capacity? That would make me and probably a lot of other users happier.

Umm how is the iPhone not for tech people? I know plenty of tech people including myself that use iPhones. Just because someone has a android phone and they may root, hack and put emulators on there devices doesn't make you some kinda tech genius. I mean my 16 year old nephew has my old SGSII and hacks it all the time and he is far from a "tech person".

Exactly!!! You buy a " Smartphone "( especially iPhone ) for all the cool features... Now they tell us to turn off all the features to get more life from the battery. I don't know... Maybe u could fix the "Dumb" battery issues so we could enjoy are phones a little bit more.

I do the same things on my iphone 5 as well as my SGSIII when I have no need for any of it running. This is something that has to be done on all smartphones. As a matter of fact if I don't do some of these things my S III battery will last about 6-7 hours tops.

Most people aren't having this problem. Only some are, and this article is directed towards them. It's a fluke specific to the programming of iOS 6.1.4 somehow that most people don't need to worry about. Whatever phone you're using, I'm certain there are some out there experiencing issues with it that you've never encountered.

Not sure about anyone else, but I set my iPhone 5 up from a backup of my 4. Wasn't afraid to plug it in Friday, as it didn't come 100% charged. Friday night I plugged it in about 11 pm for the night. Unplugged about 7:30 am yesterday. Didn't plug it in all day yesterday. Didn't die until after 7 am this morning. When it was at 1%, I checked Usage. Nearly 12 hours of use, total time near 24 hours. That is pretty good in my book. Everything I use (wifi, LTE, notifications, push, etc) was on.

I'm not sure I understand the issues with battery life many people say they are having. Do you have like 300 apps on your phone all using location services??

This iPhone 5 is my first iPhone. I got it on my business line, while my home line is a Galaxy Nexus. The one major thing that I have noticed and taken a liking to in the iPhone 5 is that it seems no matter how hard I beat the battery I cant kill it in a normal day's usage.

Take this comparison to my Galaxy Nexus as an example (and keep in mind while reading that my nexus uses verizons extended 2100mah battery). I unplug both phones at the same time in the morning. With both phones on wifi, I pull up a 2D game on the iphone and play for an hour straight, never once touching the nexus in that hour. At the end of that gaming session, my iPhone is at 90% battery. The Nexus? 92%. If i didnt pull up a game on the iPhone at all for the course of a charge I'm pretty confident I could get almost, if not, two full days on a single charge. That's pretty spectacular battery life if you ask me. If I tried doing straight gaming sessions with my Nexus I might get 3 hours of battery life out of it TOPS before needing a charge.

If you are having issues with battery life on the iPhone, factory reset it and only reinstall apps you use on a normal basis, all while keeping tabs on things like which apps you allow location services and push notifications to. More than likely those with battery life issues are suffering from having too many apps using these services on your phone.

As a former owner of a HTC Thunderbolt... battery life can make what is actually a great phone sub-par. When I first got the Thunderbolt, I did not see the battery issues that some reported or I was to naive or proud of the device to realize it was actually that bad. After a few weeks, I snapped back to reality as I couldn't trust my phone's battery if I was out all day and didn't have access to a charger. So I did what all the forums said to do... shut LTE off, turn off push email, kill apps that run in the back ground like maps and location services, and the list goes on (see above in the article.) But I soon realized that anytime I wanted to use the service and features I manually had to turn them back on... annoying. Always having to check email instead of getting notifications, not having location services... again the list goes on.

What I realized is what is having a great phone that has great features if I can't leave them running because they would suck the life out of my battery. While I don't plan on getting the new iPhone 5, I hope for the sake of the people who do that the battery issue is a non-issue. If the battery drainage is an issue trust me, no matter how good the iPhone 5 is it will NEVER be great and especially not the "best smartphone ever." It will be just another phone that had potential that users can realize the full potential.

But I'm sure there will be other proud iPhone users that will never be able to admit that the battery issue is that bad or that not being able to use the full portfolio of features is an issue. Trust me, just because it says iPhone doesn't make the battery issues or hassle caused by it go away. And I question, why spend that kind of money if you can't use it the way is was meant to be used???

You know the most frustrating thing is that regardless of if the 5's battery life is good or bad, we know they could have made it better by keeping the thickness and weight of the 4S. Were people complaining about the size and weight of the 4S? Of course not. I hate that kind of "design". It's not just Apple doing this, but they may be the worst since they don't give you any other options.

I 100% agree, with that thickness the battery could have been bigger at least by 20-30%. iPhone 4 & 4S was already thin. Please Apple stop this Craziness of wanted paper thin products. make the parts inside the device small but keep the shall the same and add bigger battery.

The battery life on my iphone 5 is MIND blowing so far.... i went the whole day yesterday with JUST simply checking and replying to facebook and texting and finished the day off with 90% at like 1am in the morning.

100% charged mine at 6:45 last night. I did not use it at all except checking the time now and then and at 9 am the next morning I am at 58%. At this rate I figure I'll get just 36 hours standby if I don't touch it vs the 225 advertised. I am taking it back to the Apple store tomorrow and seeing if they can figure out what is up.

You should realize before you do that when they say 'standby time' they did those tests with the Cellular radios OFF. You wouldnt believe how much of a difference you'll notice in battery drain with the phone in airplane mode. I would whole heartedly believe that this phone can go 200+ hours on a single charge in airplane mode with the screen off the entire time.

Standby times are greatly misleading. In the real world no one will ever hit those times because no one is going to leave their phone in airplane mode for 10 days.

Nothing has changed in my usage since before iOS 6 but my battery life sucks now! I'm charging it daily. I do use it often but never had to charge this much. Right now I have 10% battery life left with 5hrs 46mins usage and 18hrs standby.

I was a devoted Android user who thought iPhone was all hype. I caved and got a 4, later upgraded to a 4s and haven't looked back. Battery life on the iPhone 4 and 4s is far better than Android. My wife has a new S3 and I see that Android battery life is still terrible. Never thought I would say iPhone is better but....

iOS 6 on my 2 year old iPhone 4 seems to get slightly better battery life than iOS 5 did. With iOS 5 the battery life would go down about 10% per hour of actual usage according to the Usage page in Settings. Today has been a fairly light day of usage - 1 hr 49 minutes usage and 13 hrs 21 minutes standby - and the battery is still on 85%, so it's currently about 19 minutes ahead of iOS 5.

It is possible for new phones to come with duff batteries or older phone batteries to suddenly deteriorate and with so many iPhone owners it can simply be a coincidence that this happens to some at the same time as they upgrade to the next version of iOS (or it happened a few days or weeks ago and they only just notice when testing the new version).

In any case, if the battery life is absolutely terrible (like reaching 10-20% with only 5 hrs of usage that are not CPU/GPU intensive usage hours like gaming) then I would strongly recommend going to an Apple store if possible to get them check it out as they can perform extra diagnostics.

I just fixed my battery problem but other's issues may be different. After the fix, in 2 hours of using the iPhone 5 for about 8 minutes, with 120 minutes of standby, I'm still at 100%. But earlier today (Sunday) I went from 100% at 10AM to 10% by 3PM. That's about 5 hours to drain the battery with light use!

iPhone 5. That got back the rest of my battery life. Didn't have to reset settings this time!
When I would look at Settings > General > Usage it didn't show any "usage" or "standby" time, acting like it was never fully charged (actually it was only at 99% when I woke up after 8 hours of charging). I estimate that I used it maybe 10 minutes for browsing, 30 minutes reading, 10 minutes phone calls, 5 text messages over that 5 hour period.

And I always have everything turned on with my AT&T iPhone 4S (including location, notification, WiFi) with no issues before. The 4S would only drop to 10% by 12 midnight (15 hours) with normal/moderate usage. But today I could actually watch the battery gauge drop 10-25% per hour, depending on whether I left the phone alone or used it a little. And the phone was running hot very often. I tried to reboot it a couple of times, and turned it off and back on several times but that didn't help and it kept running hot. The Apple store had no appointments till the next day.

I tried think of anything that could have made things go wrong. I had set up my iPhone 5 Friday night, and had sync'd my backup onto the new phone. At first I thought everything was there when it stopped loading stuff back onto my phone (apps, music, movies). But apparently it had never finished the "restore backup" process without me knowing it. Everything looked like it was done, including iTunes showing only 5GB of free memory on the phone. But each time I made a change to my app selections or playlists, the next sync would copy over extra files that should have already been on the phone from my backup. All day Saturday the battery life was fine, before I did my last sync when I went to bed. That last sync killed the battery life, and also prevented more than 99% charge by morning.

It turns out that iTunes had still not sync'd everything when I restored my backup, because at some random point it was hitting a wall at syncing several audio books I bought from Audible.com in 2003 or 2004, long before Amazon bought Audible. My username and password from Amazon were merged into the Audible.com account last week, after I bought some free kindle books that included free matching audiobooks. Apparently this username and password mismatch must have been giving the iPhone fits?

I didn't know what was happening until I wiped the phone, re-installed iOS 6.0, and restored from a backup again tonight (I really needed to restore my call logs and several years worth of texts, etc). I watched closely to see what files were being copied, or where in the process it would fail. That's when I had the Eureka moment, and made my discovery when it failed at those audio books. Strangely iTunes gave no errors at that point, it just quit syncing my backup and acted like it was done. I went to my settings and told it NOT to sync those books, and hit the sync button once again, and it finished the sync/restore of backup without further problems.

As I got close to finishing this post on my Mac, my iPhone was only down to 99% after 2.5 hours off the charger, with about 12 min use and 2:17 standby. Not syncing the old Audible books fixed the problem it seems. I'd give credit to the "restore to factory", but there were definitely some issues with restoring the backup until I didn't sync those books.

EDIT - Battery life improved from avg of 18% per hour drain to 9% per hour with my above fixes. But It still wasn't good enough and I also had some ghost voice memos that got duplicated 4-5 times when I had the failed multiple restores of my 4S backup to the 5 (itunes said they were there on the iPhone 5 but they didnt exist on the 4S or 5) and some music that wasn't syncing due to corruption. The corrupt music files couldnt even be converted into another format, and had to be lost. I removed the voice memos and bad files on the 4S and backed it up again, and restored onto a fresh iPhone 5. Didn't have to reset all settings. Now at 2 hour 40 min I'm still at 100%, and at 3 our 38 minutes standby, 24 minutes usage I'm at 99%. Much better !!!!

All info given to expand battery life is amazing and works great. Its just the obvious thing that any android consumes much battery than other phones. In any case if it seems to you that your iPhone/iPad battery is getting down and you have to spend sometime without charging it. To restart your iPhone is the great option as you want to get back some battery of your iPhone. By doing this you can get little of you battery back. I found at http://howiphone.net/how-to-restart-iphone-ipad-ipod-touch/ that On other hand if you want to reset your iPhone you can also go for it. As it would wipe your all corrupted apps present in your device. Which could save your device battery life. By resetting your iPhone you may lost your important data, so you must have to take its backup.
Thanks

"Reset All Settings" -- especially after an upgrade from iOS 5 to iOS 6, or after restoring from a backup of a different device -- will work wonders. You will not lose data -- you will, however, have to reset things like wallpapers, ringtones, WiFi & VPN connections and some other things found in the Settings app.

I have the same problem with my iPhone, the battery didn't last long. Although I'm only using it for text and some mobile surfing, the battery don't last a day. I brought it to an apple store and miraculously they fixed my battery problem. Glad they did!

I have the same problem with my iPhone, the battery didn't last long. Although I'm only using it for text and some mobile surfing, the battery don't last a day. I brought it to an apple store and miraculously they fixed my battery problem. Glad they did!

I had trouble when I first got the 5, but after a couple cycles the battery is better than the 4 was at first. You should top it off while restoring (if new), drain it, then charge it fully up. Mine averages around 10% every 4 hours with fairly high usage. At that rate it should last over a day on a charge (and it has been). It's also notable that I'm very careful about enabling/disabling settings so it can do exactly what I want/need. Everyone should do this regardless of the device.

iPhones have lithium-polymer batteries, so they are not harmed by either fully discharging (mind you, they're not fully discharging, either - iOS and the battery charge controller turn it off with some amount of reserve) or top-up charging, so don't worry about which you do. The recommendations that reduce battery will extend the lifespan of these batteries, though, so they're worth the effort.

Isn't the iphone5 supposed to have a toggle option to automatically switch from cellular data to wifi if it finds a wifi signal and is able to connect? If this is true, then having this set to automatically happen seems like a no-brainer, especially for people with muscular routers. My iphone5 is set to come in the mail monday, so I don't yet know from real-world usage, only what I've read.

Sure and an even better way to extend battery life is to turn the thing off and only turn it on once a day to see who's called or text you. The problem here is that Apple and the public (although it still remains to be seen which is the horse and which is cart) has bowed down before the altar of "the thinest." There comes a point where functionality and must trump style. Sure it's great to have a thin phone, but in reality, that really doesn't add to functionality, especially when it means reducing the size of the battery so as to really impact the run time of the unit, and ESPECIALLY since with every version come umteen million new aps that can be installed and which, potentially can run in the background and which are ALL power consumers. It is simple physics -- the smaller the battery, the shorter its life. I would much rather have a thicker phone that ran for a week without a charge that a thin one that runs for a day. I would also DEFINATELY like to see adaptors where if you do run out of battery power and you are nowhere near a charger, you could go into any grocery store buy a few AAA batteries and with the adaptor, power the phone for many hours until you get back to where you can charge it. In fact, the standard AAA battery would itself in its adaptor be able to charge the phone's battery. This is no reason why these things need to be tethered to unique, highly overpriced batteries. Batteries are batteries and any phone should be able to run on standard, easily obtainable $3 batteries. Thicker? Yah, go for it, Apple....you are the marketing geniuses, make people want sexier, THICKER phones with rechargable AAA batteries! Thicker is better.

this was also happened with my 4s !! first of all set this factory settings if this does not make the work then it has a circuit problem ... cx iphone has 3 battery points 1 is fr its board and 2 are fr the wifi !!! so i think there is a problem in ur board !!! it happened with me too !! u should contact with apple store !! it will be fixed in 80 dollars ..

Here's my little story: within a week of upgrading to iO6, my 4 began to run hot and discharge its battery, depleting itself from a full charge to 10% in 2-3 hours IN THE SLEEP STATE. Tried many of the online solutions in forums like this, to no avail, including blowing off the non-Apple email accounts; nothing worked. Apple store guy suggested I do a full restore. After backing up, I restored and set it up like a new iPhone. It ran cool for a few hours, no unusual discharge - that is, until I reloaded my two usual Windows Live accounts. Within 10 minutes the phone felt warm, hot after 15, and the battery was draining away. Rinse and repeat - I restored it again, and have since then NOT loaded the Live accounts. Running cool and long, just like it used to, for the last 3 days. Made the decision to have my Live accounts forwarded to my name@me.com account by the MS servers, rather than opt to push them to the phone.

If this was Apple strategy, it worked on me! If I want all email and calendar to arrive on my iPhone, the only option is forwarding to @me, then using iCloud Mail, Contacts and Calendar. Well played!

Can't speak for everyone but this article really helped me. Particularly restoring it without restoring back up, disabling LTE when not using and making sure no data is pushing. I also stopped using iCloud becaus I read some place that's collecting data every minute? would like to know if that's true. Initially before I did the restore, I would let it fully charge and soon as I unplugged it would drop from 100% to 99% instantly! now It's staying at 100% and I've just signed into twitter & kik messenger.. so I've used it for at least 4 mins just there and the battery is still 100%. I thought it was an issue with my phone.. but I have tried other iPhones and the same thing happens. Even when you play an app, it zaps 3-4% of the battery in a matter of 5 mins.. is that normal? by my calculations your battery wouldn't last 40 mins?

I just upgraded from an unlocked 3Gs to an unlocked iPhone 5 and my battery life pretty much seems EXACTLY like a 3-year old iPhone 3Gs on the iPhone 5! Talk about HUGE disappointment!

Well, at least everything's fluid. At LEAST. So it was like paying slightly less than my 3Gs (back then) to get a phone that's faster, with a longer screen and nicer display. But usage is still pretty much the same -- because the battery life limits what I can do with it!!!

Not a good on-the-go phone at all. At least not with the current iOS 6.0.1. At work it's alright, because I can always dock it at my desk to charge. But when I'm traveling in the city is just absolutely sucks...

After trying everything I've read online and struggling with battery life, I seem to have fixed mine. First, I reset all settings as described above. Then I restored as new and took off all of my apps. I added them back one by one by redownloading each app instead of restoring from iTunes. This was a pain but it seems to have fixed it. Before I did this, I was getting about four hours of usage a day. Now I'm getting usually eight hours and sometimes more.

If you double-click the home button you can shut off apps running the background. I do that a lot to save space. I have trouble with battery because I use a keyboard case, and it requires that your bluetooth is on for it to work. http://www.squidoo.com/best-iphone-5-keyboard-cases

While I certainly respect each of the preceding comments, my intent for researching this article and others like it is not because my iPhone is a disappointment. I happen to live in the northeast where we are about to experience a blizzard and are likely to lose power. The information in this article and others like it is likely to be very be beneficial to me and my family. To the author - thank you. To the rest of you - just another perspective.

The battery life of my iphone 5 was really bad so I started some test work

Basic conditions
Phone used modestly . This was not strictly controled and a reason for some variance
Blue tooth off because it is mostly used for handsfree calling when driving, which should be abolished
Safari out of cloud: Starting an internet brows on iphone and continuing on IPAD is never done

Results
- Strong effect of battery/drain load cyclus. No real proof that this works , but easy to do
- Switching off wifi seamed to influence battery life
- Other parameters did not have a strong effect

I have a nice battery life plot for all tests, but I cannot copy it here

Many people are having issues with battery life on phones but I have to say it is not so much the battery as it is Apps, Games, GPS and the other million new things that are now possible to do on your iPhone 5. If you do need to change a battery on your iPhone 5, I have found a good video that shows the process on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZO-Zhu2ggQ .
Hope this helps next time you need to replace your iPhone 5 battery.

BEFORE YOU LET YOUR BATTERY DRAIN FULLY:
Step 1: DON'T !!
There are two main types of batteries. Type 1 is what's not used in phones (thankfully) which is where you can only charge it once it has hit 0%. Type 2 is what IS in your phone. Type 2 is a type of battery that you are able to charge at any point, for however amount of time you desire.
Because of this, it is actually hard on the battery to completely drain it, then charge it back up again. I suggest once it gets to the "red zone" (20%), find a power source immedietly, or find the willpower to just put down your phone until you can charge it again. Never leave your phone plugged in for huge amounts of time (example overnight.) If you always follow these tips, from the moment you get your phone, you should find it'll make a huge difference.